How was Rome founded?

The legend Romans told

The story fills the first book of Livy and Plutarch’s life of Romulus. Aeneas, a refugee from Troy, settles in Latium, and his son founds the town of Alba Longa. Generations later its rightful king, Numitor, is pushed aside by his brother Amulius, who makes Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, a Vestal virgin so that she can have no children. She bears twins anyway and names Mars as their father. Amulius orders the babies thrown into the Tiber. The river is in flood, and their basket is left stranded at a fig tree below the Palatine, where a she-wolf finds them and suckles them. A royal herdsman, Faustulus, takes them home to his wife, Acca Larentia. Livy notes a skeptical version: shepherds called Larentia herself lupa, she-wolf, which was also Latin slang for a prostitute.

Grown up, the twins put their grandfather back on his throne and decide to found a city of their own where they had been saved. To settle who would rule it, each watches the sky from his own hill. Remus, on the Aventine, sees six vultures first. Romulus, on the Palatine, then sees twelve. Both sides claim the omen. In the version Livy calls the more common one, Remus jumps over his brother’s new wall to mock it, and Romulus kills him, saying that so would perish anyone who leaped over his walls.

A birthday for the city

Plutarch says Romulus marked out the city’s line by plowing a furrow with a bull and a cow yoked together, on April 21, the shepherds’ festival of the Parilia. The year was harder. Fabius Pictor, Rome’s first historian, put the founding in 748 BC. The Greek Timaeus chose 814 BC, the same year as Carthage. Varro, the great scholar of Caesar’s day, worked out 753 BC, and that date stuck. Rome still celebrates its birthday, the Natale di Roma, every April 21.

What the ground says

Even Livy did not vouch for the tales. He called them adorned with poetic legends rather than based on sound records, and added that a people as great as Rome had earned the right to mix gods into its origins. Archaeology tells a slower story. People were living on the Capitoline Hill in the Bronze Age, centuries before 753 BC, and by about 1000 BC the marshy valley that became the Forum held a cemetery of cremation graves. In the eighth century BC there were huts on the Palatine, and their postholes, cut into the rock, can still be seen. Around 730–720 BC a wall went up at the foot of the hill. Its excavator, Andrea Carandini, argued that it was the founding wall of a real first king. Most scholars think that asks too much of a wall.

In the seventh century BC the Forum was drained and paved as a public square, and by about 600 BC the hilltop villages had become one city. Many historians think the name came first and the founder after: Romulus looks like a hero created to explain the name Roma.

Is the Capitoline Wolf ancient?

Romans told the wolf story early. In 296 BC, Livy says, two officials, the brothers Ogulnius, set up a statue of the twins beneath the wolf at the sacred fig tree, and Roman silver coins showed the scene soon after. The famous bronze she-wolf in the Capitoline Museums is another matter. It was long thought to be Etruscan, from the fifth century BC. In 2007 radiocarbon tests on material from its casting core pointed to the eleventh or twelfth century AD, and experts still argue. The twins beneath her are certainly late. They were added in the late 1400s, probably by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, after Pope Sixtus IV gave the bronze to the people of Rome in 1471.